Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 12th, 2026
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”--Albert Camus
"My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to push hard on AI transformation now. The longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes to shift mindsets, workflows, and operating models around AI tools and agents.
Workforce reductions will likely be part of this transition. But over time, AI-enhanced employees will become the standard, and overall productivity and output will rise significantly."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/04/25/the-shift-to-ai-enhanced-employees/
2. "We live in the Vibes Era.
Charisma can be monetized easier now than at any other point in the history of humanity.
Meaning: people will buy from you if they think you’re a cool guy.
It sounds insane, but people are building multimillion-dollar businesses where their entire marketing strategy is centered around the founder being likable."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/the-rise-of-founder-marketing
3."The DoD’s 2027 budget request reflects this change in orientation. Here are the risks.
The big increase in funding for Autonomous Warfare may not survive the budget allocation process despite hundreds of billions of new dollars being allocated to existing conventional weapon programs as a payoff to those who would normally oppose it. The bureaucracy may prove too corrupt and ossified to complete this reorientation.
The existing conventional command structure of the US military may gut this capability, forcing autonomous weapons into a support role. This action would be similar to how France and the UK treated tanks at the start of WW2. Despite having more and better aircraft and tanks than Germany before the invasion of France, the Allies used these vehicles as infantry support rather than combining and concentrating them to unlock new capabilities.
The third risk is that the US military may be unwilling to develop the new military theories needed to turn this new technology into a truly transformative military capability that will provide the US with military dominance for years. Based on decades of experience with the US military, almost all of the people doing this theoretical work are doing it on their own dime, outside the military bureaucracy."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/embracing-autonomy
4."In essence, the disintegration of authority in Mali should be seen as the leading edge of a wider process that threatens to destabilize the entire central Sahel and export its consequences directly into Europe."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/mali-is-russias-new-afghanistan-and
5.Latest and greatest on drone warfare and tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nhpVezGGEo&t=146s
6."There is a lot of work to do first. Like many areas of the economy, the industry has suffered from chronic underinvestment. For years, the only customer was the government, which until recently capped spending on defense at 1% of gross domestic product. Even after that changed, the bulk of investment went on US technology. With onerous supply-chain demands, security was seen as high-cost and low-profit; government contracts capped profit margins, and ESG funds shied away from investing in firms that built arms. All that led multiple players, who for decades were unable to access the market in the rest of the world, to drop out of the industry.
There is a global boom in demand for arms as democracies feel increasingly under threat, while capacity at existing manufacturers is constrained by the need to replace stockpiles depleted by the wars in Iran and Ukraine. A new supplier, from a state increasingly viewed as the defender of Asia’s rules-based order and a leading figure in both heavy engineering and precision technology, is exactly what much of the world wants to see. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said this week that several countries had already approached Tokyo with expressions of interest."
7. "Harborne is, his lawyers say, an “intensely private person”. He has given no public explanation of his reasons for donating. Asked in December about his donations, Farage said, “Does he want anything from me? No. Absolutely nothing in return at all. He just happens to think that we’ve not made the most of Brexit, that we’re not getting into the 21st-century technologies.”
One 21st-century technology in particular has turbocharged Harborne’s wealth: cryptocurrency. He was an early buyer of digital tokens that have soared in value. And he is one of half a dozen enigmatic tech types who own Tether, the company that issues the most widely traded cryptocurrency.
Registered in the Central American dictatorship of El Salvador, with a tiny staff, Tether has been described as the most profitable company per employee in history. It has issued $184bn in digital cash known as stablecoins. They have grown popular as a way to move money across borders, and in places where inflation erodes the value of local currency. But billions of Tether’s stablecoins are also known to have been put to illicit purposes by gangsters, scammers, Russian sanctions-busters, North Korean hackers and others who would rather avoid the scrutiny of moving money via a bank.
Yet Farage champions Tether. “Tether is a stablecoin,” Farage said on LBC radio in September, the month after Harborne’s record donation. “Stablecoins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.”
8."The companies that win the next decade will look less like hierarchies and more like platforms for builders. They will make it easier to spin up a new product line, run a small P&L, or launch a sub-brand inside the firm than it is to leave and do it alone.
This shift is bigger than any one company. I have argued elsewhere (see HumanScale) that a more interesting economy is one with more owner-operators, fewer unicorn lottery tickets, and capital that gives a damn about what it builds. The AI cost curve is what makes that argument operational rather than romantic.
Venture math does not fit $1M to $10M ARR durable businesses. However, in this new environment where traditional economies of scale are compressed, those businesses become some of the most durable assets an investor can own. Their moat is speed, specificity, and proximity to the customer, all of which widen as AI commodifies the capabilities once reserved for scale. Direct investment, family-office equity, and community capital are all structured to underwrite that profile. The capital category is opening up at exactly the same moment the builder category is."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194824803
9.What a great list of relatively unknown Italian cities to check out and maybe live in.
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-8-hidden-cities-of-italy
10."We built conversion funnels and A/B tested button colors. We hired armies of UX researchers to agonize over empty states, loading spinners, and onboarding flows. The art of reducing friction between a human and a software action became one of the most commercially valuable disciplines in technology.
That era is ending — not gradually, but structurally.
The reason is agents. Not chatbots, not copilots, but fully autonomous AI systems that take action on your behalf: booking travel, executing research, filing contracts, managing workflows. When an AI agent books your flight, it doesn’t load the homepage. It doesn’t hover over the “flexible dates” toggle. It hits an API, cross-references your calendar, checks your preference history, and returns a ranked shortlist — bypassing every carefully crafted UX screen entirely.
The funnel isn’t just broken. It’s irrelevant.
This creates a design crisis that is also, for attentive investors, a significant commercial opportunity. The discipline that emerges to fill the gap has a name: HX — Harness Experience."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-funnel-why-hx-is-the
11. "There are two things an investor can mean when they say that they invest in people.
The first is the belief that attributes such as pedigree, biography, charisma, and past fundraising success carry more signal than what a founder has chosen to dedicate their time to. Essentially, that founders are a fungible commodity that can be stack-ranked. This is the version that Davenport’s data most directly contradicts.
The second, much rarer version is the belief that the subject being evaluated is a unique alchemical mix of people and ideas. It is the investor’s job to assemble a complete picture; the choice of problem, the form of the solution, and the character of the team. Only then, can they fully perceive the opportunity in front of them.
The two are easily confused because they use the same vocabulary. Both are expressed in the language of backing people and celebrating human potential. The first is lazy and well-rewarded by the norms of the industry. The second is hard, and often misunderstood, but it is clearly the path to better quality investments.
The argument is not that investors should abandon qualitative team analysis and return to Perkins and Valentine. The conclusion is simply that the team cannot be usefully assessed without the context of what they are working on, and the attempt to do so is where investors fall into problematic pattern matching.
This is why the atomic unit of entrepreneurship is not the founder nor the idea, but the unity of both. The venture capitalist must stand far enough back to see both at the same time, and to assess them as a single entity.
Rather than the tired question of jockey or horse, the investor’s job is to recognise the centaur."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195376695
12.How to think about your career. This is a great conversation that will help you. A new framework for finding the thing that drives you and finding your path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy659EQA2k4
13."For the last decade, the market has rewarded software, financial engineering, and asset-light business models. Billionaire entrepreneur Robert Friedland is arguing that the next decade may reward the opposite: copper, silver, gold, power, grid infrastructure, critical minerals, smelting, refining, and the companies capable of finding and building new mines.
The key line of thinking is simple: AI, electrification, defense, and deglobalization are all converging on the same bottleneck — the physical world. And the physical world cannot be coded into existence. It must be drilled, mined, permitted, processed, financed, and built.
The growing number of global wars in combination with the transition from a “just in-time” global economy to a “just in-case” global economy tremendously favors a “revenge of the miners”.
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/robert-friedland-the-next-decade
14.This is always educational and fun. Q&A with Tim Ferriss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw1-tGkT9K8&t=1731s
15.Investing legend Paul Tudor Jones. Lots of nuggets of insights. Big lesson: You retire, you die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S31J5ACsOqU
16."The similarities between athletics and entrepreneurship abound. Markets change. Talents evolve. Networks grow and shift. But if you want to stay relevant, one needs to love the process and consistently evolve their edge."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/staying-relevant
17."There is a reason why we say around late 30s/early 40s a cliff appears. By this general age band, you know who is going to take the leap and who isn’t. The results start pouring in and you basically know who is going to be in corporate forever and who isn’t. There are always exceptions but this is a good guideline. We’re aware of all the cope people throw out.
“Tons of business success starts at 40”.
Not really. The success stories at 40 were planted about 5 years ago. While their first successful business was started past 40, we’d bet practically everything we have they were already tinkering before that (running some sort of Ebay business, affiliate marketing, trying to flip a house, etc). Chances are slim that someone is making $400,000 in a corporate gig, quits and spins up some random website that knocks it out the park. That person has a history of tinkering in the dark before that happened."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/changing-strategies-to-reach-various
18."Humanity keeps evolving. Yet, humans keep resisting change. The question is who a leopard, a lion, a jackal, a hyena or a sheep. The sheep, by the way, will continue to have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.
Elon Musk put the situation starkly. The only way we can outrun a $35T deficit is to adopt a whole new operating system for society. We are not just talking about upgrading to AI and robotics. We are talking about moving from linear to exponential, from control to contributor architecture.
Today, those same bureaucratic rent-seeking Jackals and Hyenas (Bureaucracy Mandarins) are now being replaced by code. Trump’s rhetoric invokes a “Lion under siege” by scavenger “Jackals and Hyenas.” What is it the jackals and hyenas are trying to protect? What is their equivalent of the Donnafugata Villa? It’s the cash flows from oil and gas, from the pharma industry, from the world of healthcare, from the military industrial complex companies that make weapons and which will have nothing to do if there are no wars. If code decides which ventures get funded, then the market makes its own choices. The Mandarins don’t get to control who gets money anymore.
The Mandarins logic is simple. Scarcity is the only thing they know. Abundance threatens their whole power structure. Free energy threatens the oil/gas/petroleum byproduct cash flows. Abundance of health through preventative healthcare threatens big pharma and big healthcare and even big food. It certainly threatens the energy and military industrial complexes."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-leopard-jackals-cole-tomas-allen
19."Style is not about impressing others, it is about demonstrating discipline. A well-dressed man shows that he respects himself and that he can be counted on.
Unfortunately, a lot of men will continue to overlook these basics. That’s why mastering them will set you apart from the crowd."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-five-style-mistakes-most-men
20."The version of the next decade I’d most like to see is the one where more capital flows back toward the local, the patient, and the productive, and away from the abstracted financial machinery that has absorbed most of it. More owner-operated businesses across more communities, building real wealth for more families. Fewer unicorns and more durable five-million-dollar companies that employ thirty people for thirty years and pay back every neighbor who put twenty-five thousand dollars into them at the start.
This would be a renaissance of community-level capital relationships that the financial industry doesn’t notice until it’s too late, because the financial industry was built to bypass it. However, it requires a generation of builders who learn that a focus on patience and value creation (run on a system) will rather than speed and exit (run on hope).
That isn’t a fantasy. It’s how most economies were built before the venture narrative captured the imagination of every ambitious twenty-something with a laptop. The mechanics didn’t stop working, but they went out of style since the people doing didn’t need to be in the press releases.The capital is there. The opportunities are there. The product without a problem doesn’t need to exist, and the builder who finds that out cheaply, who designs the system that validates whatever should exist instead, and raises the right capital from the right people on the right terms, is exactly who the next decade is going to reward. That builder is probably already in your community. Possibly you if you design something worth funding."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195575961
21.Probably one of the most honest conversations with a public tech company. This was quite illuminating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlPCz8Jwypw&t=49s
22.This is a must watch. What the future holds when you have an insane level of change happening. Disruptor or disrupted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b90cx-o1M3I&t=648s
23."That is what “one nation’s shortage is everybody’s problem” looks like in practice.
A war in the Persian Gulf becomes a sulphur shortage in China. A sulphur shortage in China becomes a chemical shortage in the Congo. A chemical shortage in the Congo becomes a copper and cobalt shortage everywhere. And a metals shortage everywhere means higher prices for the battery in your phone, the copper wiring behind the drywall in your house, and the data centers running your favourite AI tool.
That is the cascade.
And we are barely into it.
The shortages are already baked in the cake. You cannot wish them out. You cannot slogan them out. You cannot print them out.
You can only prepare for what comes out of the oven.
Every great economic transition in history has had casualties. The casualties were the people who refused to see the transition coming. The survivors were the ones who looked the change in the eye and adjusted."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-boring-industrial-shortage-thats
24."Founders in SF have always benefited from high-value networks, but over the past couple of years they’ve become far more aggressive in how they leverage them. Have a bug? Reach out to the CEO. Want early access to the next release? Get your VC to connect you to the CEO. Trying to get into that invite only party with the who’s who of your sector? Reach out to the party organizer (aka the CEO).
These days, founders up and down Silicon Valley unapologetically search for and leverage “ladders” in order to skip steps. They’ve become far more aggressive at this than I’ve ever seen before — going into social debt to a degree that would have been considered inappropriate (and, frankly, cringe-worthy) only a few years ago. But these days, it’s increasingly perceived as a socially-acceptable form of ambition.
These founders are sprinting and scrambling as fast as they possibly can up each and every ladder they find. Occasionally, they screw up and slide back down a “snake”. But no one in the valley bats an eyelash. There are no negative social implications. Meanwhile, founders everywhere else in the world are dutifully running back and forth along the left-to-right game squares. Some of them are trying to go faster (aka 996), but all of them continue to follow the linear, back-and-forth path.
Have you ever heard of anyone winning a game of snakes and ladders without climbing a ladder? Me neither.” https://chrisneumann.com/archives/snakes-and-ladders
25.Solid dissection into the brilliant mind of top tier investor and entrepreneur legend Elad Gil. This was awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HutNi2cNsCg
26. Bit of a grim episode but lots to think about in the present tech environment. Exits & growth bigger than ever, but boy is the competition insane right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXToQKc430c
27."The game industry will almost certainly grow over the next decade. Humanity’s desperate need for entertainment and escape is, if anything, accelerating. But how much responsibility can the Japanese government claim for it? Even if the numbers hit the official targets, I suspect that will be due less to subsidies than to unforeseen X-factors — such as how Japan’s tourism boom is less due to the government’s promotional schemes than it is a super-weak yen.
One thing is for sure: game makers no longer have to worry about a government driving customers away from their businesses. And Kagemasa Kozuki, who hid the fact he worked in games from his own children? He’s worth $3.2 billion today, the seventeenth wealthiest person in Japan — and a symbol of how video games transformed from a moral panic into a pillar of Japanese society."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/press-any-button-to-continue
28."Network tribalism, amplified by the chaos generated by globalization, accelerates the hollowing out of the nation-state. This tribalism makes political reform efforts impossible by turning minor decisions into contentious fights and every option into a choice between good and evil."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/tribal-terrorism
29."If the executive branch is the monster, Congress is Dr. Frankenstein. Since World War II, the legislative branch has slowly delegated its powers, acquiescing in the face of presidential expansion — washing its hands of wars, scaling back oversight, outsourcing rules and regulations, and weakening its authority to tax and spend. Meanwhile, a seat in Congress has become the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme, as lawmakers are effectively immune from insider trading prosecutions. In 2024, Republicans David Rouzer and Susan Collins registered returns on their investments of 149% and 77%, respectively; Democrats Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Nancy Pelosi performed slightly worse, at 142% and 71%. The S&P, a decent proxy for your retirement portfolio, returned 25% that year.
The question isn’t why Congress’ approval rating is so low, at 10%, but why it’s that high. Fourteen of the past 20 national election cycles have been “change elections,” with the out-party retaking the White House or at least one chamber of Congress. But the only real change since 2000 has been a 3x increase in the share of Americans who say the government is the most important problem facing … America. In a recent interview, former Senator Ben Sasse said government is a tool of the people. Imagine a power drill becoming sentient and coming for our eyes.
The question isn’t whether the U.S. can renew itself. History says yes. Americans yearn for better leadership. But this misses the point — the people running the country aren’t stupid, they’ve been incentivized to continue to engage in corruption, demonization, and the trampling of institutions and norms. We don’t have a leadership crisis but a consequence deficit."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/the-reckoning
30.A solid discussion on the venture capital industry and where it is going. Also a great retrospective on one of the most storied VC funds in the world. Union Square Ventures. Fun jaunt in NYC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDyKQXjVbU&t=1507s
31.Lots of juicy news in Silicon Valley today. Solid episode this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpYTFmS4Ak&t=749s
32."My recommendation for a multi-startup founder is straightforward. Focus on one startup exclusively. Capture ideas for future ventures, but do not spend time building them until your current company has achieved a level of success, predictability, and scale.
At that point, if another idea is stronger or you are motivated by starting from zero, pursue it with a new team. Trying to build two startups from scratch at the same time is a recipe for failure. Pick one idea, go deep, make it work, ensure you have a team that can sustain and grow it, and only then begin building your next company."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/02/the-multi-startup-founder-conundrum/
33.Actually a solid episode this week. Lots of interesting takes on Silicon Valley news. The Peptides discussion was interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpC4sbawSzQ&t=661s
34.I thoroughly enjoyed this. What are the traits of the top .01%
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWqB9eAKMx0
35."It is well established that, despite significant import substitution efforts, Russia has failed to effectively replace advanced Western components in its long-range strike weapons, including their guidance systems, which continue to rely heavily on Western electronics typically imported through third countries.
If sanctions enforcement has tightened, further curtailing Western supply and forcing Russia to resort to domestic or lower-quality foreign components, Russian IMUs could become progressively less accurate, while GNSS receivers may grow more vulnerable to Ukrainian jamming. In theory, this could greatly enhance the chances of success for Ukrainian electronic warfare efforts."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/can-ukraine-jam-russian-ballistic
36.Geonomics and what is happening in the world. Who wants what. In a world of deglobalization aka The One world economy is over.